Coherence and discontinuity Shaping the mother in the short story sequences of Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter

This thesis explores how Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter use the short story sequence to destabilize the reader's understanding of motherhood by using ruptures inherent to the sequence form to rupture the literary mother, conceiving her as "the place of splitting" in Julia Kristeva's words. Beginning with Welty's The Golden Apples, this thesis suggests the sequence as an indeterminate form brings legitimacy to the indeterminacy of the mother's voice. Moving to O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, however, a threat against such legitimacy appears as O'Connor uses the sequence form to decry the binding of the mother's pliable voice into the rigid assumptions of socially driven stereotypes. Finally, Porter's The Old Order adapts the sequence form across several publications to integrate nontraditional and even ambiguous mothers into traditional maternal experience. 1